Xi3 Piston first look, internals still unknown

Towards the end of 2012 a kickstarter project came to light called the Xi3 Piston, which is a mini-PC that has its sights set on gaming, so it made perfect sense for the project to receive backing from Valve. We’re told that this gaming PC will be tailored to work with Steam’s Big Picture Mode, but as yet what we know about the internals is just speculation.

It’s looking more likely that the Xi3 will be based on the X7A, but should come with more powerful hardware. A recent hands-on from CES 2013 suggests that we could expect up to a 3.2GHz quad-core AMD R-464L APU, but that’s about all we know so far. However, you can see from the video below that the Xi3 will be all about its connectivity.

There’s a huge array of ports and the device will be able to offer support for three monitors, rather than two on most standard PCs. One concern for us is the Xi3 Piston price, as it’s assumed that it will be around $999, but it’s clear to see that many gamers believe this to be too expensive and should have a price of $400 or below to stand any chance of success.

Because this is such a compact design and will no doubt come with a pretty decent graphics card you would assume that the computer could overheat, but because it will have a low energy consumption of 40W, this will no doubt help to keep the heat levels down.

Gamers have already began to doubt the Xi3’s success because it’s meant to be a gaming PC, yet it will not be able to play games like Crysis, but do you believe this will be a major issue?